Whether Minnesotans fought for or against the Vietnam War, the experiences they collected often sit like pieces of shrapnel in their lives. But often enough, when veterans, family members, protesters and refugees share their stories, they trigger a healing process.
In September, filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick will debut their new 18-hour documentary “The Vietnam War,” a project that has been 10 years in the making and revolves around the questions that continue to hover over the war’s turbulent history and its impact. In a parallel track, TPT launched “Minnesota Remembers Vietnam,” a year-long initiative aimed at telling the Vietnam War’s untold stories from a local frame of reference. Along the way, we’re gathering the stories of Minnesotans who were directly affected by the war – and those stories will be collected on an interactive, digital Story Wall that serves as a space for connection, understanding and healing.
If you have a story to tell, please consider sharing it on MNVietnam.org.
By Kay Adkins Brown
Dear Galen,
What am I going to do with all this art? Over one hundred pieces of works on paper, stacked atop tables in the family room. Each image contains a shape or shadow of your Vietnam experience. Over forty years you worked through it again and again in your art.
Now I am working through it. These images retrieved by your daughters from a Northeast Minneapolis studio when you died. They kept your Purple Heart, your Marine insignia’s, photographs of you, but your art has come home to me.
Legally, the art belongs to your daughters through a hand written will penned before your death in the Veteran’s Hospital. It is the only thing you had left to give them, but it is a legacy of monumental proportion, and now I have an obligation to do something with them.
Why? I am your ex-wife. We have not lived together for over twenty years. But, I always loved you dearly and respected you equally.
Our time together was not easy. You knew that. We stopped sleeping together because of your nightmares. There were times when you would sit in front of the television for days, immobile. PTSD was not even a diagnosed condition. In the early years, a bottle of Vodka and conversation shared with your brother, another Vet, gave you a certain release. The two of you would recount your Vietnam stories, sometimes horrific, late into the night. I would listen. The images of your stories infiltrated my dreams.
Fortunately, you had another release, your art. For the ten years we were together, I saw you getting better. You took your anger, your sense of injustice, your belief in democracy and the Constitution of the United States and turned it into works of art that challenged all those who viewed it to think.
However, doing art did not support our family, so I left you. Over the years as you continued your art, I believed it healed the wounds you carried.
Galen, your daughters and I have created a retrospective of your work; “Galen Arthur Brown, Shapes and Shadows”. It will have its premier in Minnesota at the Northfield Art Gallery in Northfield, Minnesota, Sept. 28-Oct. 27, 2018.
The pieces for this show were carefully selected. I spent hours looking at them, touching them. I had conversations with you. Through your art, I understood you in a way, I don’t believe I ever understood you before. Marine, wounded warrior, activist, philosopher, loving father. Your journey is captured in this Retrospective. Your daughters and I are proud you left us with this legacy and honored to share it with others.
During this process, I, too, have been healed.
Thank you, Galen.
Kay Adkins Brown
Add your voice to the story at MNVietnam.org
© Twin Cities Public Television - 2017. All rights reserved.
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